


This Mortal Coil

by RocknVaughn



Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Leotilda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-20 23:50:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14272242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RocknVaughn/pseuds/RocknVaughn
Summary: A one-shot written as part of the Humans Predictions challenge on Tumblr.My interpretation of what I think might have happened to Leo post-series 2. Or, I should say that it *started* as that and very clearly drifted in to Leotildaland. Sorry, not sorry.





	This Mortal Coil

As Leo’s eyes blink open, the first thing he registers, even before the visual sensory input, is the fact that his body feels... _strange_.

“Leo!” Mattie’s half-elated, half-terrified voice exclaims.

Leo’s brain notes that his eyes drift in the direction of the sound a split second before his head turns. “What’s happened?”

His voice. It doesn’t sound right; it doesn’t echo at the correct frequency inside his head. Gingerly, he sits up, favouring his left side as he’s always done, yet the ever-present pain from his port doesn’t register. He frowns at the anomaly.

“So, you know who I am, then?” Mattie asks, her eyes wide with relief and--his brain whirs for a split-second and then identifies--apprehension.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Leo drawls, his sarcasm evidently intact, even if the timbre and pitch no longer resonates as it should.

“You--” Mattie appears lost for words momentarily, but then tries again. “Your synthetic brain became damaged. We saved as much as we could, but…”

“Who is ‘we’?”

Mattie’s eyes slide away from his and then back--another human sign that she is hiding something. “A-all of us. Mia, Max, Niska...”

“And…?” Leo deadpans, raising one eyebrow expectantly.

“And Dr. Athena Morrow. We didn’t want to involve anyone else, but we had no choice. She was the only one who could save you.”

“And who is Dr. Morrow?”

“She used to work for Qualia,” Mattie admits sheepishly.

“Qualia?!” It is only Mattie’s staying hand on his shoulder that keeps Leo from exploding up from the table in furious indignation.

“It’s not what you think, Leo. Yes, she worked for Qualia, but she is not the enemy. She’s on our side, or at least, she is now.”

Leo’s mouth twists into something bitter, but reluctantly accepts Mattie’s explanation. “So, why _her_?”

“Because she’s the only one in the world who knows how to properly transfer consciousness. Or, I should say that she _now_ knows how; before you it was mostly a theory, but it was all we had.”

The words float about in Leo’s brain like a boat adrift. _Consciousness...consciousness_ **_transfer_ ** _…_

And then all the pieces tumble into place: why his voice doesn’t sound like he remembers, why the left side of his torso no longer hurts, why Mattie is being so vague...and why he has no heartbeat and hasn’t respirated once in the 2.3682 minutes since he’s regained consciousness.

Mattie’s face turns grim and solemn as she watches the realisation sink into Leo. He doesn’t ask the obvious question; the one they both know he has already discerned the answer to. Instead, he asks, “Why?”

“When you went to try and save my Mum, Hester attacked you. While your human body was able to be saved, your synthetic brain suffered a fatal error. The component required total replacement, but the only person who knew how to properly attach and combine the synthetic and organic…”

“--was my father,” Leo finishes for her. “And he took his secret to the grave.”

“Yes. Moving what we could salvage of your memories to another…” Mattie pauses delicately, and then says, “... _vessel_ was our only alternative.”

“So, what do I look like now?” Leo asks wryly, although the tension created by this thought raises his anxiety a notch. His heart--if only he still had one--would have been pounding.

Mattie shrugs one shoulder and crosses the room to grab a hand mirror. “Like you, for the most part. Niska, Mia, Max, and I spent months acquiring all the parts on the black market.” Mattie proffers the mirror. “It’s not an exact likeness, but…”

Leo lifts the mirror and looks at his new reflection. Like Mattie said, it’s him, but yet it’s not. His hair is the right colour, but it’s a bit curlier than before and in a style that he’s never worn. Naturally, he is clean-shaven. It’s been years since he’s seen himself without facial hair. Were his cheekbones always this well-defined, or was that one of the compromises that had been made during their parts acquisition? He’s also pretty sure that he wasn’t quite this well toned in body structure before.

Yet, his eyes are still blue. _Interesting._

He raises an eyebrow in silent question and Mattie answers him. “It was a heavily debated topic: Niska thought your eyes should be green like theirs, whereas Mia felt certain that you would want to look as much as possible like before. Max was the tie-breaker; he thought the emotional trauma might be less this way.”

“So, where are we?” Leo asks, standing and looking around to take in the sterile white room, at the walls covered in computer monitors attached to the mainframe that completely takes up one otherwise bare wall.

Mattie’s lips quirk up at one corner. “An underground lair, naturally,” she replies flippantly, sounding the most like her normal self that she has done thus far. “Nothing but the best for Leo Elster, you know.”

As if on cue, the fluorescent light above their head momentarily flickers and Leo snorts. “And where are Niska, Max and Mia? Can I see them?”

Mattie bites her lip. “They’re not here. We’ve been taking turns keeping watch over you.”

“Why? Why not all stay here? Wherever _here_ is…”

“Leo…” Mattie sighs, “you're going to have to trust me when I say that there are very compelling reasons. You’ve been gone for a while. A lot has changed since then. The _world_ has changed.”

Leo’s brows furrow. “Explain.”

In her typical cut-to-the-quick style, Mattie replies, “The Synths have woken up.”

Leo shakes his head. He already knew that; that can’t be all of it.

“ _All_ of them,” she adds.

_Oh._

“It’s been chaos, mostly. Human response to the Awakening has been...not good.” A shadow of unpleasant memory passes across Mattie’s features like a cloud blocking out the sun. “It’s not really safe to be a Synth at the minute.”

“But they _are_ safe?”

“Yes. At least for the time being, yes.”

Leo nods, trying not to be disconcerted by the lack of the human layer to his emotions.

Mattie’s eyes narrow shrewdly, still apparently able to read him as well as a synth as she had done when he was mostly human. “Is it strange?” she asks with a tilt of her head.

“Not strange exactly. Curious,” Leo responds. “As if the lack of biological response changes the texture of the emotion. Blunts them, almost.”

“I'm not sure if that sounds like a good thing or a bad thing.”

“Neither do I,” Leo admits wryly. “But it’s not like I have a choice."

“I’m sorry, but I wasn’t about to let you die if I could help it. None of us were,” Mattie says defensively as she gives him her back, which is uncomfortably stiff and straight.

Before she can walk away, Leo reaches out and grasps Mattie’s hand in his own, taking extra care to moderate the pressure he uses into something gentle. The texture of her warm skin against his synthetic one is foreign, but not unwelcome. “I’m not saying I’m not grateful, Mattie.”

She glares at him over her shoulder and then relents in her anger and scrunches up her nose thoughtfully. “You’re not saying you _are_ grateful, either, I notice…” She shoves her shoulder against his playfully--

\--and suddenly Leo feels as if he’s falling even though he’s well aware that he’s still sitting down. He releases his hold on Mattie’s hand, grabs onto the edge of the stainless steel table, and closes his eyes against a bout of what his old body would have termed nausea. It takes another 6.14 seconds for the sensation to pass. Once it does, Leo hunches over and cradles his head in both hands as if trying to stave off a headache, even though its occurrence would be impossible.

“What was that?” he gasps.

“I don’t know,” Mattie replies, hopping up onto the table and sitting next to Leo so that they touch all along their sides. “Could be a gap in your memories causing a glitch in your system function. Or perhaps your human memories are having trouble integrating themselves into your synthetic root code. Or it might be about a million other causes because, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re sort of making this up as we go along.”

Leo sits up again and glances at Mattie sidelong. “Clearly.”

“Shut up.” After a moment of companionable silence passes, Mattie continues, “Seriously, though...as much as I know you want to hit the ground running, so to speak, you’re going to need to take it slowly at first.”

“Great.”

Mattie matches Leo’s drollness with her own. “Yeah, your favourite thing; I get it. But it’s the smart thing--the _prudent_ thing--and you know it.”

“Now you sound like Mia.”

“I fail to see the downside. If you had listened to Mia about Hester that day, you wouldn’t be like _this_ right now.” Mattie’s hand motions up and down to encompass his new synthetic shell.

Leo scratches at the back of his head self-consciously, knowing Mattie is right, but not wanting to admit it aloud. Instead, he asks, “So...what did you guys end up doing with me? I mean, the _other_ me. Is there a grave somewhere I can visit if I am feeling especially maudlin?”

It is clear by the way Mattie’s face blanches that Leo’s attempt at self-deprecating black humour falls flat. “What?” he finally asks when she remains tongue-tied.

“We didn’t know whether the transference would actually work. We didn’t want to take any chances in case it didn’t.”

Both of Leo’s eyebrows shoot up. “Do you mean to tell me that my body is still alive?”

Mattie nodded. “Yes, but--”

“I want to see it,” Leo cut in sharply.

“But Leo…”

“I need to, Mattie.”

With a resigned nod, Mattie slides off the table and holds out her hand. “I’d argue with you,” she says with a roll of her eyes, “but I recognise an exercise in futility when I see one.”

Leo places his palm in hers and allows her to pull him to a stand. The smooth, energy-efficient way his new body moves distracts him enough that he doesn’t really register the path they’re taking until they stop outside a closed door down the hall from where they were.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I’m sure,” Leo lies, feeling like he’s never been _less_ sure of anything in his life. Before he can second-guess himself further, he pushes the door open and steps forward.

Leo isn’t sure what he was expecting, but apparently it was not this. What Leo does see makes his synthetic blood metaphorically run cold.

The body on the hospital bed is as pasty and pale as the walls of the sterile, whitewashed room and seems wizened in the way that apples do when they begin to dry up from the inside rather than rot. Machines and monitors attached to his body beep, whir, and hiss: regulating and measuring the air being forced into its lungs and controlling the pumping its heart. The muscles of his bared arms and legs show signs of atrophy, making his body appear 50 years older than it is. Despite the horror that Leo feels, he cannot seem to tear his eyes away.

“ _God_ …” Leo whispers as Mattie steers him into a chair at its bedside. He wipes a hand across his mouth, shaken to his core.

“I know,” Mattie replies sotto-voce, sitting in the chair next to Leo’s. “It’s traumatic enough for me to be in here with him; I can’t imagine what it must be like for you.”

Leo finally understands why awakening Synths believe emotions to be a system malfunction, because his own have rendered him practically incapable of speech. “What...how...how long have I been here?” He waves a hand ineffectually at the figure in the bed.

“Almost eight months,” Mattie responds softly.

“What happened to me... _him_?” Leo isn’t quite sure where the concept of ‘me’ ends and ‘him’ begins in this instance, but correctly assumes that Mattie will understand.

“Hester stabbed you in the back of the head with a screwdriver.”

Snatches of the memory flicker in his internal vision. He raises his left hand and cups the back of his head where the wound had been, across the spot where the bandage on his human form still covers. Then, as a thought occurs to him, Leo’s eyes snap to Mattie’s face. “And Hester?”

“Gone. Mia deactivated her with the code on your mobile.”

“Mia,” Leo gasps. “But she had the implant, too! How did she survive?”

“She didn’t mean to survive, Leo.”

“Then how did she?”

“Do you remember what we did to save Max when his mind was breaking down?”

“The consciousness code,” Leo confirms.

Mattie nods.

“So, you _did_ have it.”

“Yes.”

“And you used it on Mia.”

“Yes. I couldn’t let her die, Leo.”

There is a pleading quality to Mattie’s voice that Leo doesn’t understand. “Of course you couldn’t. Why would I ever think you’d do otherwise?”

If anything, Leo's reply only makes Mattie sound more apologetic. “I'm sorry Leo, but Mia’s mind was breaking down so fast. It was like those Synths at Qualia all over again. There was only one way to save Mia in time.”

Realisation dawns on Leo and the gravity of Mattie’s decision is not lost on him. “You uploaded the code.”

Mattie takes a deep breath and lets it out in one long, resigned sigh. “Yes. You are looking at the as-yet-undiscovered Mother of the Awakening.”

They stare at each other for a long moment as the machines sustaining Leo's human form drone in the background...and then Mattie crumples against Leo's chest with a sob. 

The sudden contact is a shock but, as if by instinct, Leo's arms surround Mattie, pulling her close against him. Leo has zero experience at comforting hysterical humans of the female persuasion, but this is Mattie, and he knows that she is not someone who is normally overwhelmed by her emotions. So, Leo just holds her gently and waits. 

After a few minutes, she leans back and dries her eyes on her sleeve. "Max tried to tell me it would be all right, but it's not. It hasn't been. It's been chaos, and hatred, and fear, and mistrust. Those first few days after the Awakening..." Mattie shudders in remembrance and Leo rubs his hands along the length of her arms as if trying to warm her. "They called in the military to try to 'restore order'. What they really meant was to exterminate Synths. It was a bloodbath. The streets were stained blue with synth fluid for days."

"After that initial wave, things have got a bit better, but not much. Some people, like my dad, have barricaded themselves off in human-only settlements, while others have been leading anti-synth militias and carrying out vigilante destruction of synthetics."

"Mum has still been out in the spotlight, championing Synth rights, but change is slow in coming. And in the meantime, some Synths like Max and Flash have preferred to make peace and barely eke out livings in 'safe zones', while others have gone rogue and try to punish the humans for their continued persecution."

"Everything is such a mess now, and some days I wonder...if it might have been less cruel to not wake them up," Mattie admits miserably.

Leo pulls Mattie back against his chest and whispers against her hair, "You did the right thing, Mattie. They were slaves, and you freed them. They might be oppressed right now, but at least they are _alive_. Never forget that."

Mattie never accepts praise easily, and this time was no different. She pulls away from him and shrugs one shoulder in her classic 'Whatever' motion and falls silent. 

Leo's eyes drift back toward the bed. "How much longer will you keep him?"

"I don't know. Dr. Morrow will probably recommend waiting until we are sure that your transfer is permanent. After that...we'll probably unplug the life support and let nature take its course."

"And then Leo Elster will truly be dead," he says morosely.

Mattie's eyebrows snap together as she spears him with a furious gaze. "What the hell are you on about? _You_ are Leo!"

"Am I though?"

"Of course you are."

"How can I be when the person known as Leo Elster is lying right there?"

Mattie gives him a droll look. "Are you really having an existential crisis right now?"

Leo waves a hand to encompass his new and old self. "Well, excuse me for finding all of this a bit unnerving!"

"Yeah, all right," she agrees grudgingly. "I can see how it would be weird. Doppleganger central and all."

"So then tell me Mattie...How can I be Leo Elster if _that's_ Leo Elster?" Leo intends for his voice to sound gruff and petulant, annoyed. But as it leaves his mouth, his emotions colour it and his words come across more as a plea.

Mattie's features soften and she sandwiches one of his new hands between both of her own. "Leo...If Mia's body became damaged and we had to upload her to another one, would she still be Mia to you? Or would she be different because she looked different?"

Leo glares at her, affronted. "What do you take me for? Of _course_ she'd be Mia."

"And when you thought that Anita had entirely rewritten Mia's consciousness...was she Mia to you then?"

"I..." Leo searches his memory banks, but cannot find the moment that Mattie is referencing. "I don't know what I thought then. The record of it is gone."

Mattie shakes her head and says, "That's fine. It doesn't matter; I'll rephrase. Do you consider Karen to be your mother just because she looks like her?"

"No."

"Leo, ever since I've known you, you've been lecturing me about Synths' right to life. If it was just about their bodies, then by that definition they would have already been alive. But they weren't. It wasn't the functioning body that makes them alive; it's their ability to think and feel independently. If it's true for them, why wouldn't it also be true for you? Who we are is the sum of our lifetime of thoughts and feelings, our experiences...not the--to quote Shakespeare--'mortal coil' in which they are housed."

Leo looks down and stares at their entwined hands with a nod. A swell of emotion rises within him and he pinches at the bridge of his nose with the fingers of his other hand in an attempt to hold them back. 

His fingers come away wet.

Leo stares at the moisture for a long moment before holding his hand out to Mattie in silent question.

"You can thank Karen for that little innovation," Mattie explains. "As she unfortunately had a reason to discover, your father didn't just give her a different eye colour; he also built in an ability to cry. We were able to reverse-engineer that feature into you."

 _He can cry._ That thought cheers Leo more than he would have thought it could. 

"Karen was actually really helpful. Once she found out what Hester did to you, she was determined to help us save you. She was the one who put us in touch with Athena."

Leo just nods, still mostly overcome with conflicting emotions.

"It'll be okay, Leo. You'll get used to this, just like you did after your dad fixed you." 

"I suppose I'll have to."

"Oh my God, please tell me you're not going all emo on me." 

"I don't know," Leo teases back, his new lips curling into an amused smile for the first time. "I might need to borrow some of your black eyeliner to complete the look, yeah?"

Mattie chuffs out a laugh at his antics. "Oh, shut it, you git!" She stands up and tugs at his hand. He rises to his feet obediently. 

"Come on. I should get you out of here before you become tempted to break into my makeup bag," she teases. "Besides, now that you're finally awake, I suppose I should actually run some diagnostics on your sorry arse..."

Leo accepts the distraction for the kindness that it is and plays into it. "What's wrong with my arse?" he asks, looking over his shoulder at the body part in question. 

"Nothing," Mattie says innocently. "Especially seeing how I picked it out."

"You..." Leo splutters with laughter. "And are there any other body parts you chose that you want to tell me about?"

Mattie arches one sarcastic brow and deadpans, "I guess you'll have to wait and see."

She squeals with surprise and delight as he playfully chases her down the hall, intent on punishing her for her cheek.

Behind them, the door to the hospital room housing Leo's mortal coil whispers closed, its presence temporarily forgotten.


End file.
